This Sydney entrepreneur built a salary calculator to show how startup founders are paying themselves too much

While some entrepreneurs may enter the startup game looking to get rich quickly, Sydney founder Marty Spargo has built an online salary calculator to show founders that “entrepreneurship is not as glamorous as it seems” by proving that the higher a founder’s salary is, the lower the long-term value of their equity becomes.

StartupSmart spoke to Spargo, as well as PoweredLocal co-founder Michael Jankie and Blackbird Ventures co-founder Niki Scevak, about how much a startup founder should pay themselves.

Across the board their responses were unanimous: it should be the bare minimum in the short term to grow equity and wealth in the long-term.

Spargo is the co-founder of Sydney energy drink delivery startup Reize, and was inspired to create an online founder salary calculator after his experience in the Sydney startup ecosystem saw him witness a rise in “new founders, usually coming from the corporate world and having expectations of making millions”.

“I think I have a duty of care to provide some of the harder truths about entrepreneurship — it’s not always as glamorous as it seems,” Spargo says of his motivation to build the tool, which was launched this week after a month of development and trials.

The calculator asks founders to nominate how much they want to pay themselves, as well as what revenue returns they want to see from their startup’s marketing spend. Read more